Development and adaptation of active dependency completion mechanisms

理解儿童如何像成年人一样有效地理解语言是正常语言习得理论和异常语言习得理论的中心目标。发展研究表明，虽然许多语言知识是在生命的最初几年发展起来的，但儿童并不一定擅长在实时语言理解过程中快速使用这些知识。例如，随着句子的展开，成年听众和读者能够根据他们的语言知识或句子结构的分布，连续预测句子可能如何继续。然而，儿童的预测机制有时与成人的预测机制不同，他们必须在语言习得过程中以某种方式形成成人式的预测机制。了解这一发展过程可能会导致旨在提高儿童语言理解能力的教学技术的进步。这也可能改进成人语言障碍患者的临床干预方法，他们的理解机制表现出与儿童相似的特征。本项目调查了儿童和成人填充缺口依赖加工机制的发展和适应。在理解“艾米丽用什么吃蛋糕--？”这样的问题时，成年人通过将错位的wh短语“What”与动词联系在一起来逐步完成依赖，但孩子们要等到遇到动词和它的宾语之后才完成依赖。该项目的主要假设是，语言经验和输入中的分布规律在填空依赖完成中预测过程的发展和适应中起着关键作用。这一假设的动机是双重的。首先，在发展心理学中，分布规律可以引导儿童的认知和语言发展，这是公认的。其次，成人心理语言学研究中的许多工作认为，句法启动是一种内隐学习机制，它反映了一种内隐学习机制，这种机制根据最近的语言经验调整了理解过程。句法启动是一种由抽象句法结构重复产生的加工促进。综上所述，儿童的理解机制可能会适应一种类似成人的机制，其基础是a)在动词位置完成的填充缺口依赖的长期积累，以及b)在实验会话中这种填充缺口依赖的句法启动。相反，成年人的理解机制也应该适应儿童一样的保守机制，在接触到在言语后完成的填空依赖之后。为了验证这些预测，Omaki博士将进行一项语料库研究，调查英语填空依赖在成人对话和儿童指导的言语中的分布模式，以及ii)对儿童和成年人进行的五个眼球跟踪实验，探索填空依赖加工的时间进程，以及它与启动句子的相互作用，这些句子旨在创造对替代依赖完成机制的偏见。因此，这个项目将成人心理语言学和语言发展这两个传统上分开的领域的问题和方法联系在一起。

Understanding how children learn to comprehend language as efficiently as adults do is a central goal for theories of both normal and abnormal language acquisition. Developmental research has shown that, while much linguistic knowledge develops in the first few years of life, children are not necessarily adept at quickly using this knowledge during real-time language comprehension. For example, as sentences unfold, adult listeners and readers are able to continuously predict how the sentences are likely to continue, based on their knowledge of language or the distribution of sentence structures. However, children's prediction mechanisms sometimes diverge from those of adults, and they must somehow develop adult-like predictive mechanisms during the course of language acquisition. Understanding this developmental process could lead to advances in the pedagogical techniques that aim to enhance language comprehension in children. This may also improve clinical intervention methodologies for adult patients with language disorders, whose comprehension mechanisms show similar characteristics to those of children's.This project investigates the development and adaptation of filler-gap dependency processing mechanisms in children and adults. In comprehending questions like "What was Emily eating the cake with -- ?," adults incrementally complete the dependency by associating the dislocated wh-phrase "what" with the verb, but children wait to complete the dependency until after the verb and its object is encountered. The main hypothesis of this project is that language experience and distributional regularities in the input play a key role in the development and adaptation of predictive processes in filler-gap dependency completion. The motivation for this hypothesis is two-fold. First, it is well established in developmental psychology that distributional regularities can bootstrap children's cognitive and linguistic development. Second, much work in adult psycholinguistics research has argued that syntactic priming, a processing facilitation that results from repetitions of abstract syntactic structures, reflects an implicit learning mechanism that adapts the comprehension procedures in accordance with the recent language experience. Taken together, children's comprehension mechanisms may adapt to an adult-like mechanism based on a) a long-term accumulation of filler-gap dependencies that complete at the verb position, as well as b) syntactic priming of such filler-gap dependencies within an experimental session. Conversely, adults' comprehension mechanisms should also adapt to the child-like, conservative mechanism after exposure to filler-gap dependencies that are completed at a post-verbal position. To test these predictions, Dr. Omaki will conduct i) a corpus study that investigates the distributional patterns of English filler-gap dependencies in adults' conversations and child-directed speech, and ii) five eye-tracking experiments with children and adults that explore the time course of filler-gap dependency processing, as well as its interaction with priming sentences that are designed to create a bias towards the alternative dependency completion mechanism. As such, this project links questions and methodologies in two traditionally separate fields of adult psycholinguistics and language development.